Hyrax International LLC offers you best in class guidance across all phases of  your program life cycle. We emphasize project de-risking strategies that identify potential threats to your project, assess likely impact and define clear, concise solutions. Risk avoidance is what it’s all about. We have the experience and the ability to transfer that knowledge directly to your team.

Our practice emphasizes in-depth audit and assessment of program areas such as management, quality assurance, risk management and customer satisfaction, delivering focused initiatives to improve efficiency and cut out risk. Some of the audit areas we are often asked to review include:

• Program & project plan – Does your project have a complete project management plan? Has the appropriate software life cycle been defined and practices set in place to ensure project health? Have appropriate program plans been specified and maintained, including: Design and work plan; Testing plan; Test analysis standards; User manuals and studies; Implementation procedures; Integration plans and dependencies; Interface requirements; Business assumptions; Quality assurance plan; Risk management plan; Transition and operational phase plan?
• Quality assurance – Who is responsible for quality metrics, project audits, requirement audits, checklists, enforcing standards and process, auditing deliveries, and discovering discrepancies between requirements, project artifacts, and functional goals. In other words, is there a program in place that ensures the overall standards and practices of the project are being followed?
• Requirements management process — What kind of process and system is in place to capture and document requirements? To commit to sign-off on requirements? To assess impact through different aspects of the planning, quality, development, user and delivery phases?
• Change control and reconciliation — Is there a process in place to validate initial requirements assumptions? What happens assumptions become invalid? How are discrepancies reconciled? Is there a plan for capturing change, quantifying it, and assessing impact to the project? How will impact be communicated internally and externally?
• Metrics, progress and goals — Measuring progress is the first step toward delivering on-time and on-budget. Is there an early warning system in place to predict deviations from project plans, assess impact and make corrections? What metrics are you currently gathering? How are they assessed? What deviations from project plans will they detect?
• Risk management — Is your project following appropriate risk identification and management procedures? How is risk raised and handled? How will impact to the project be assessed and mitigated?
• Transitional phase preparation — Development and delivery doesn’t even get you halfway to success: How will the system be maintained after it enters the operational phase? Will it survive “across the chasm” to market acceptance? What sustainability and scalability concerns are likely to become obstacles to success?

Methodology

Choosing the right methodology is critical; yet, it can be a minefield as well. For example, combining an inexperienced team with agile is seldom a wise idea, but a mature team can often sustain surprisingly large-scale projects with it. This is almost counter-intuitive: Heavier tends to support immature development teams better than agile, while mature teams often achieve great success with it. Many assume the opposite, as immature teams tend to favor lightweight, easy to use processes (the “let’s just code it” attitude), while mature teams tend to favor “complete” processes that better represent a full product life cycle.

Hyrax has in-depth knowledge of heavyweight and lightweight (agile) methodologies. We can assess the right solution for your team, tailor a process that will succeed with your unique talents and constraints, and work hand-in-hand with you to get successful.

Technical assessment

Hyrax Subject Matter Experts represent the best in their fields of process, database, language, integration and operating system specialists. We can provide hands-on, in-depth audits at a technology level to assess competency and assess delivery risk.